Arts & Eventz

When the American Bach Soloists take on the grandeur (and three-hour-plus extent) of The St. Matthew Passion at Saturday at the First Congregational Church, it will be with a somewhat different, more unified sense of that great work’s contemporary significance.
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Actor, director, composer Andy Garcia’s The Lost City is billed as a love song to Garcia’s native Cuba, to the island as it existed before Fidel Castro’s revolution. The movie attempts to evoke a paradise lost, a land of music and dance and family destroyed by corruption and violence.
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Ever get that midweek feeling of wanting to escape up the coast? Spend some time near the water in a picturesque town? Walk past quaint cottages and historic buildings? Roam the landscape allowing your eyes and mind to expand across open space? Discover a café, deli or fine restaurant and treat your taste buds to new flavors? Even without the time needed to reach Mendocino, a solution for the midweek blues is close at hand.
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It’s been way too long since I’ve gone to a meeting of California Rare Fruit Growers. There’s one such meeting tomorrow (Saturday May 13) in Walnut Creek that is weirdly tempting because it will feature Dr. Robert Raabe, whose approach to plant diseases is of the gleeful sort, which can be fun but rarely works well as a bedside manner for humans.
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“Now is the Winter of our Discontent,” rings out offstage, as silent Lady Anne (Tiffany Harrison) has laid at the audience’s feet the first of many forlorn coats that signify their absent—and murdered—wearers, and Subterranean Shakespeare’s production of The Bard’s Richard III gets underway at the Berkeley Art Center.
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I’ve seen only a handful of bobcats in my life, most of them in or around Point Reyes and the Marin Headlands. My one East Bay encounter was about a decade ago, while heading out to Briones Regional Park on a spring morning. The cat was crossing Bear Creek Road near the reservoir, not being in a particular hurry about it. The first reaction in such sightings tends to be “funny-looking dog,” and then you notice the pointed ears and the abbreviated tail.
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